The Rebel State, as it is known, has long been a thorn in the side to Colombian governance. The first time Venezuela appeared particularly rebellious was during La Cosiata.
Valencia, Venezuela, had long been a thorn in the side to most revolutionary rulers. The conservative, Catholic Valencian elite had resented Bolívar’s wars of independence, and had even refused to send any delegates to the Anfictionic Congress, instead deciding to stay put and bid their times for the “inevitable Reconquista” that never came. When joined together with the rest of their Venezuelan brothers in the State of Venezuela, independent from the State of New Granada, the Valencians acquiesced, with only slight grumbles, to their new system. Convinced that, away from subjugation to New Granada, as had happened during the rule of the Bourbon crown, they would be able to take leadership of the State away from the traditional capital of Caracas (at that point, a tall order) and start leading the Venezuelan state. However, this did not assuage all the doubts and anxieties of the Valencian populace, which, much like the Pastusos and Caucans who led the Crown Affair, were ready to boil over as soon as an opportunity arose.
The fearsome llaneros from the Venezuelan Plain were often considered Colombia's most crack cavalry. Their leader at the time, José Antonio Páez, has had his name become synonymous with "traitor" in Colombian speech.
That opportunity’s name was José Antonio Páez, the leader of the
lanceros del Llano, Bolívar’s most trusted and feared cavalry corps. Páez had been fundamental in the independence campaign of the State of Venezuela, particularly fearsome in the Battle of Carabobo. His charge, which would be romanticized forever by particularly nationalistic-minded Venezuelans, was seen as the breaking point of Spanish rule in Colombia at the time. Indeed, Páez had for a long time been Bolívar’s right hand man regarding military matters; although his star had begun to fade as Bolívar increasingly associated himself with Chilean Bernardo O’Higgins, Agustín de Iturbide, José de San Martín, and especially (and particularly hurting to Páez, due to their shared Venezuelan ancestry) Bolívar’s young protegé, Antonio José de Sucre.
Liberal, Neogranadine, civilian smugness was exemplified by Francisco de Paula Santander, "the greatest Neogranadine in history". However, Páez resentment was just as directed at a fellow Venezuelan, Bolívar's new protegé and, according to many at the time, Crown Prince, José Antonio de Sucre.
The fact that the Colombian Parliament’s ruling class was monopolized by civilians, and especially, those of liberal, Neogranadine extraction, also sat very badly with most other Colombian inhabitants at the time. While most other States would justify themselves in the fact that, for now, the Colombian parliament sat at Santafé de Bogotá, and would do so until the city of Las Casas could finally be built on the Ithsmus of Panamá, which meant that until then it wasn’t in the best interest of the other States to send their best and brightest to oversee the parliament of what was then seen as a glorified military alliance. On the other hand, the situation in Venezuela was different; traditionally subsumed in administrative issues by the Neogranadines, they saw this dominance from their Western brothers as a form of colonialism against the smaller province.
Páez seemed to have started heavily resenting the Bolivarian order as he saw his close ties to power slowly but surely fade everywhere outside of Western Venezuela. In 1827, Páez was tasked with conscription of a large portion of the population to ensure protection of the Caribbean shoreline from Spanish attacks. This mobilization order hit Venezuela especially hard, which led to strong pushback – especially in originally loyalist cities, notably the city of Valencia. Instead of putting down the riots and rebellions rising against the mobilization order, Páez joined the cause of the rebels, leaving the Valencia garrison to its devices and leaving for Santafé. The Valencia garrison quickly surrendered to the rebels, declaring the independence of the Free State of Venezuela, with its capital in the city (rather than Caracas), on April 30th, 1828. Thus starts the brief but momentous period of civil unrest in Western Venezuela named
La Cosiata.
At its greatest extent, the upstart Free State of Venezuela controleld nearly a fourth of the State.
The events of
La Cosiata are still strongly disputed by historians and political scientists nationwide. The famous argument most strongly poised by Juan Daniel Franco Mosquera states that
La Cosiata was initially little more than a vanity project by the Valencian elite and Páez, which sought “separation from New Granada” and “the continued protection of El Libertador”; two things that essentially entailed membership of the Colombian Empire’s policies at the time. On the other hand, more critical historians such as Andrés Damasco, Pedro Obrador and Juan Duhalde-Perón suggest that the Cosiata rebellion was essentially inevitable since the independence of Colombia, as the first of many painful moments in which Colombian state relations were tried and tested. Particularly, Damasco gives the rebellion great importance as the first time the secession of a State from the Union was attempted. It was lucky, then, that this precedent was attempted first in Bolívar (and Sucre’s) own home states, where they were insanely popular, and therefore where selling the idea of absolutely ending the agreement of protection under
el Libertador was extremely hard.
Because of the circumstances of Venezuela (its high militarization under the Captaincy-General had allowed a large degree of forts to exist throughout the province, easily allowing the Colombian troops, even though they were few and far-between, to hold out easily under the under-armed Venezuelan rebels. The rebels themselves were not numerous, and, especially in Eastern Venezuela, Páez soon became extremely unpopular. Only the
llaneros provided any sort of hope to Páez’s soldiers, but even they would have conflicting loyalties. Indeed, the rebellion would end within a year of it starting, without conclusively being able to bring the Free State of Venezuela into fruition or allowing the Valencia criollos to re-establish the Spanish Captaincy-General of Venezuela.
What was truly impactful for the future of the Colombian state was the Septembrine Conspiracy, meant to strike at the very head of the Colombian Empire, which started once Páez arrived to Bogotá in mid-late August of 1828.
-Historiography of La Cosiata. By Pedro Cabello, University of Barquisimeto.
Si de Bolívar la letra con que empieza
y aquélla con la que acaba le quitamos,
«oliva» de la paz símbolo hallamos.
Esto quiere decir que la cabeza
al tirano y los pies cortar debemos
si es que una paz durable apetecemos.
If, from Bolivar, the first letter which it starts with
And that which it ends with we remove,
"Olive", symbol of peace, we find.
This means we must the head
And the feet cut from the tyrant
If a long-lasting peace we wish.
-Luis Vargas Tejada, Venezuelan conspirator.
A shake jolted Simón awake; the first thing he saw was Manuela, desperate, trying to get him awake and alert. The behavior was unlike her; Manuela, the military heroine of Colombia, was dispassionate, strategic, always alert.
Something must be wrong, he thought as he jumped to his knees.
“There’s shots at the gate”, Manuela said. “Someone’s forcing their way in”.
The words were all it took to make sure Simón was ready and alert, and already on his feet. By the time he came to, it was obvious that what Manuela heard was indeed very worrying. Fighting was heard from the lower floors of Palace of Saint Charles. Doors being forced, furniture crashing and the occasional shot were heard. Indeed, something very worrying was going on.
Rage flushed to Bolívar’s cheeks, as he remembered all his previous battles. Just like in Ayacucho, Junín and Boyacá, he was going to win. He was going to defeat those traitors, goddammit! He might be outgunned and outmanned, but he had his trusty sword and his gun. If he was going to go down, he was going to take every single one of those who dared to storm his own house down with him.
It was Manuela who convinced him to live: cold, tempered Manuela who he could trust to take the best possible decision when his mind was clouded by the images of victory and greatness. “You are rash, impulsive, and violent”, she screamed through whispers, “but you have never been stupid until now. Are you going to face dozens of enemies with a sword? Do you want them to turn you into a new Caesar?”
“Caesar triumphed!”, Simón yelled.
“Caesar
died”, Manuela whispered back. “He died with twenty-three wounds on his back and nobody to support him. And his empire fell into chaos and thirteen years of war. Is that what you want? Would you rather die than live?”
“I would die brave, not live a coward!”
“You would die a martyr, and a stupid man. You would abandon your men to their fates. You would lead Colombia to destruction! No sir. It’s not cowardly to choose your battles.”
“But-“
“Don’t be stupid. Don’t leave us alone to fight your fight. Escape. Jump out the window.”
Simón knew Manuela was right. Dying on a fight against forty men would be no use; it would give them what they wanted. Instead, he opened the window. The drop was not steep; two meters at most. And outside, having heard the commotion in the makeshift Imperial Palace, was José Palacios, the house butler, a freed slave. José’s familiar face gave Bolívar calm as he jumped off the palace, to flee into the dark.
By the time the Conspirators forced themselves into the bedroom where Simón was sleeping not an hour before, Manuela had been alone for quite some time; Simón had fled into the streets of Bogotá. And Páez, as he left the Palace, believing falsely that all guards had been killed and his anonymity remained, knew his revolt had been defeated.
Bolívar’s luck is not to be understated. Not only were all his moves relatively successful, especially after the liberation of Colombia; but it’s also of particular luck that the main attacks against the Bolivarian order imposed at the start of the Empire came from areas where the majority was relatively supportive of Bolívar; Conservative Catholicism, in the Crown Affair, and Venezuelan conservatives, in the Valencia Revolt and the Septembrine Conspiracy. In both cases the issues were localized, and came from Bolívar’s own political side, the militarist right.
"It did not have to be this way. The vibrant culture of Santafé political clubs, born inspired by the cafés in Frankfurt and Paris, had turned against monarchism during the Wars of Independence, and were decidedly Republican related to Colombian governance. In fact, for a time it was believed widely that the Septembrine Conspiracy was not led by Venezuelan nationalists but rather by Liberals, specifically the Parliamentary Socratic Society, a secret society which included such important figures as Francisco de Paula Santander, at the time Prime Minister, and José María Córdova, famous Neogranadine patriot (and eventually, the State of Antioquia’s Founding Father), due to the fact that Pedro Carujo and Luis Vargas Tejada, two members of both Páez’s closer circle and the PSS in the Anfictionic Congress.
Colombian political groups began coalescing into the first political parties of the country. The Santanderean Liberal Party would become a mainstay of Colombian politics.
A different world can be imagined, one where the conspirators were both Liberals and local nationalists. If the rebellion had started in a place where Bolívar’s support was not that strong, such as Perú or La Plata, rather than Venezuela, his homeland and the place where he was the most adored. The fact that, increasingly, his right-hand-man was another Venezuelan man, Antonio José de Sucre, also took wind away from the sails of Venezuelan nationalists; they were represented at the very top of the Colombian establishment. If, as they came to be known, the “most rebellious province” was justly represented, what right did the other States, with important people such as Agustín de Iturbide, José de San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins amongst Bolívar’s closest, to secede?
The rebellions of 1827 and 1828 were seen as a huge threat to the Republic, and indeed seem to have sent Bolívar into a great depression which he did not survive. However, its rippling effects were almost entirely beneficial to the Empire, due to different motives.
Manuela Sáenz, the Lady of the Sun, was named "the Liberator of the Liberator" by Bolívar, his lover, after she saved his life in the Septembrine Conspiracy. Manuela Sáenz would soon become a darling of Colombian public opinon.
First of all, the attempted coup against Bolívar galvanized public opinion against rebels. By and large, the opinions of rebels were seen as out-of-touch, extreme and dangerous, and therefore extremely few relevant people throughout the Empire sympathized with them. Instead, Bolívar became far more popular than he already was. Even amongst liberal and republican circles,
el Hegemonte, as he became known, became a slight folk hero as the man who protected the unity of Colombia against royalists who wanted to bring the Spanish yoke back; after all, as the creoles said,
mejor gallo criollo que gallo importado (it is better to have a Creole chicken than an imported one). Bolívar, previously a controversial figure amongst most of the population, became almost universally beloved overnight. His respect, and therefore the respect for his wishes for the future of Colombia, further grew when, after the Septembrine Conspiracy, Bolívar officially named Manuela Sáenz, his paramour, the Lady of the Sun (
La Dama del Sol), bringing joyous celebrations to the Pacific area, with a glorious march passing from Popayán through Sáenz’ hometown of Guayaquil and down the Peruvian coast until Lima. The fact that Sáenz soon after became pregnant with Bolívar’s child was not seen as scandalous (Sáenz was married to the British James Thorne) but rather as a happy moment, and the first ever Crown Prince of the Empire (the title, though useless, brought the Colombian crown traditional justification and even quiet blessings from the church where scorn was previously common), José Tristán Bolívar, was born on July 10th, 1829. At last, Colombia had a First Family; even though Tristán would never be Emperor, and the title would of course pass to a new family as soon as Bolívar died, this would prove fundamental for the recognition of a Colombian national identity.
Another effect of the revolt was that the political elite of the Colombian Empire, both in its military, Bolivarian side as well as in its parliamentary side, realized its great fragility.
From the military side, the Páez rebellion was fundamental to Colombian unity in that it proved the need for the nascent country to centralize its defensive capacities. While before even the military, in theory Bolívar’s exclusive competence, had been treated as more of a military alliance than a true confederation, this began to change after the Government of Santafé realized he could not let regional
caudillos duke it out for themselves while the central government dealt with whoever came out on top. Instead, regional militaries had to be loyal to the central government from the start. Soon enough, national leaders began centralizing their militias on themselves, sending off future Páezes to the sidelines. While this had the potential to become an even greater problem, as possible rivals to Bolívar loomed large (San Martín, especially, at one point had control over nearly half the country’s estimated forces), the fact that eventually most of those great men would become Emperors themselves would further centralize power on the Imperial throne, rather than on regional governments. Indeed, it can be said that the first step from the “Alliance phase” of the Empire (comprised mostly of Bolívar’s tenure) would start giving way to the “confederal phase” after the 1828 revolt.
The Santafé elite was also shaken by the fact that the Venezuelans, who they had considered their closest brothers, were rebelling against them. However, there is not much to be surprised when analyzing the attitudes of the New Granada elite towards the rest of Colombia, even areas much more developed than Santafé itself. Neogranadines had benefited from the fact that, until the new capital of the Country was built, Congress resided in Santafé de Bogotá, the previous Viceroyal capital; while Bolívar moved quite a lot until his depression and bouts of tuberculosis in 1828-1831, most of the times, due to a central location, the close distance from the Spanish Antilles, and the fact that Iturbide and San Martín held the north and south of the Empire respectively, Bolívar stayed either in Guayaquil (where Manuela Sáenz lived), in Santa Marta, in his hometown of Caracas, or in Bogotá. This gave New Granada unduly influence in the development of Colombia, comparable to that of Virginia and Pennsylvania in the early years of the United States. Furthermore, while Neogranadine elites in the Palace of Saint Charles, the National Congress and the
cabildo of the State of New Granada were all closely interchangeable, few other States sent their best and brightest to represent their provinces in a rubber-stamp parliament far off in Bogotá. Therefore, the New Granadine elite began to see themselves, not as
primus inter pares in a community of federated States but rather as new colonial masters.
The Septembrine Conspiracy changed everything as New Granadines realized their position at the helm of Colombia was actually quite tenuous, which led them to quickly lose the superiority complex they had previously held over other States. Soon enough funds for the construction of Las Casas on the Ithsmus of Panamá became forthcoming, close to the town and fort of Chagres. A study on the creation of the first American railway, connecting Chagres to Panamá (now called Ciudad Bolívar), was commissioned (and eventually construction came underway). Initially destined as a symbol of the first steps to equality between all Colombian states, would eventually become the first step in the end of the first States system, and the loss of preeminence by the Bogotá elite in favor of a new national American elite.
The Panama Railroad, America's first railroad, is a direct result of the Páez Revolt.
Furthermore, the defeat of Venezuelan rebels would lead many to understand that the future of Colombian political discussions would not come through a rule of the strongest in the field. Indeed, many people were pressured to instead begin focusing on the Congress as a way to enact change and influence in the country. After all, the military power became more and more concentrated on the Bolivarian elite; why would an upstart
caudillo be able to exert more power than, say, José de San Martín? The complex system of parties and clubs that would soon be born in every State would become fundamental to the growth of political power, and bureaucracy began to replace arms as the easiest way to grant political followers some say in the system. By the end of 1830, the Parliamentary Socratic Society was to merge with Mexican Republicans (a political movement based on figures such as Vicente Guerrero, Miguel Domínguez and Nicolás Bravo) and the Argentine Unitarians (with figures like Juan Lavalle, José María Paz, Cornelio Saavedra and Bernardino Rivadavia) would coalesce and form the Liberal Party, which would become the behemoth of Colombian politics to this day.
Finally, the effects of the Septembrine Conspiracy on the Imperial Succession were greatly important. Bolívar’s mortality was starkly put at the forefront of political discussion. To many, the understanding came that, although this conspiracy had failed, it’s entirely possible that sooner, rather than later, Bolívar would die (something that would prove to be accurate). While discussions between possible
diadochi were not particularly deep and the succession was still confused and difficult to execute, a peaceful succession of power was mostly assured by all Colombian leaders, who would form a sort of “military council” after Bolívar’s death. This way, the Imperial mantle would become growingly less important throughout the 1830s and 1840s, leading to the slow decline in Imperial power.
Thusly, despite the fact that it is often overlooked as a failed rebellion by traditional historians, the Septembrine Conspiracy cannot be understated. It is possibly the most momentous event in Colombian political history.
-“September Nights and Long Knives”, the third entry in the History of Colombia Redgistro, by La Platan historian Juan del Río. Translated to English weekly by the Colombian Studies observatory of Wesleyan University.